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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

Where’s The Tape?
by Roger Nichols

Yet another album project to do, and not a tape machine in sight. Recording directly into Pro Tools. Actually, except for Steely Dan projects, everything I have done in the past three years has been directly to some form of hard disk recorder. At this moment in time, all professional 24 track and 48 track machines have ceased production. So if you don’t get used to hard disk recording soon, you probably won’t be recording on anything.

Steely Dan
The 2000 Steely Dan concert tour was recorded to a pair of Mackie HDR 24/96 machines locked together by time code and word clock. We recorded 17 shows. Each show was a little over two hours long but fit nicely on a single hard disk per machine. The recording process worked flawlessly. I used the analog i/o cards in the machines and fed them from the direct outs on the Yamaha PM4000 console mic pre-amps. The direct outs were after the input trim, but before the fader so that fader movements on the console did not affect the levels going to the recorders.

Digital Performer
A friend has a small studio in his house. His recording software preference is Digital Performer. I have mixed previous projects at his studio, but this time he wanted to record. We recorded bass, drums, keyboard and electric guitar directly into DP 3.0 without a hitch. We recorded about eleven takes of one song, all in the same session. After the last take it was easy to go get pieces from earlier takes to piece together the master. Another job well done.

Random Artists
I have been working on another tribute project. A bunch of artists playing their favorite songs from one artist. The last three artists were recorded directly into Pro Tools. They included LA Express (Tom Scott, Max Bennett, & Robben Ford), Phoebe Snow, and Toots Thielemans. The producer was worried about possible system crashes during the recording. He said, “LA Express hasn’t recorded together since 1976. I want to make sure I get this session recorded!” I told him that things were pretty bullet proof these days, and if there was a crash, we could get back in just a couple of minutes. Afterwards everyone was very pleased with the results. Perfect recordings without so much as a burp.

Dave Bryant
I recorded an album for Dave Bryant (Ornette Coleman’s keyboard player) last December. Pro Tools was the medium of choice. We recorded the entire album as one big long Pro Tools session document. Because of the time pressure, we did not have the time to close one session and open another. During overdubs we just went to the marker for that song and pressed record. We never had to worry about needing “just one more track.”

Tracks To Burn
Speaking of tracks, the days of running out of tracks is over. Never again do I have to bear the wrath of the lead singer yelling, “Find me one more track on that tape or I will get somebody in here who can!” Ouch! Even if your system only has 64 voices, you can still mute some tracks temporarily, record more passes, and then sort things out later. Even with the Digidesign 001 limit of 24 tracks, you can do a sub-mix, open a new session, and record 22 more tracks. When you are done recording, take it to a studio with a bigger system and import all the tracks for mixing.

Most DAW systems have “quick punch” for punching into record on the fly. What actually happens is that while playing, the new track is being recorded even before you punch the button. When you get to the actual punch-in point, there is an edit performed just as if you pasted a new region over the old one. After the recording you can change the region boundary earlier to use that great lick the guitar player played just before the punch.

If you punch early or late, it makes no difference. “Not there, that was a 6/4 bar. You punched two beats early!” Just drag the new region over two beats to the right and everything is back to perfect.

Sample Rate Clog
You can’t call Roto-Rooter for this one! If you want to record at 96k or 192k, you are going to be limited to the number of tracks you can work with. The problem is bandwidth. You can only get stuff on and off the hard disk so fast with PCs and Macs. If you have a Sun workstation or a Cray mainframe, then no problem. Geordie Hormel is the only guy I know with a Cray, and he won’t let me borrow it.

Remember when Pro Tools required two hard disks and half of the audio got recorded on each one? Well “They’re back!” Even with 160 Gigabyte drives turning 15,000rpm, you can’t get all of the data on and off of one drive. This means extra housekeeping nightmares when you do backups. On restoring, files have to be split back up onto at least two drives. If you want maximum tracks at 192k, you have to split things up among four hard drives. Mama MIA! What if the files were 192k 8bit files? Then you could brag about recording at 192k, and still get everything on one hard drive. Good idea, huh?

I think higher sample rates are being pushed upon us not by hi-fi gurus who want us to improve the sound of our recordings, but by hard disk manufacturers who want to sell us four times as many drives as we bought last year. And because of all of this, 50 Gigabyte tape backup systems are a joke. We have to spend more money on the next generation of backup systems and spend another fortune on backup tapes.

Ya know, maybe I won’t make backups. It will be 20 years before someone wants to re-release some of this stuff, and by then I will be selling snacks out of my converted container on some lonely beach in the Bahamas. Who cares?

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Roger got the container, had windows installed, and is currently checking on prices to ship it to Grand Bahama Island.